Investor says bitcoin's quantum risk is moving data, not wallet keys

Andrew Gault, the venture capitalist who funded the quantum hardware labs now threatening bitcoin, says the industry is fixated on the wrong half of the quantum problem. Rather than wallet keys, he warns the urgent exposure is the encrypted messages moving between exchanges, bridges and custodians today.

"The financial system's most dangerous vulnerability isn't stored data, it's the data moving between institutions right now," Gault said, adding that adversaries are collecting encrypted traffic to decrypt once quantum capability arrives. He noted that CISOs have been trained to protect data at rest, while attackers are patient, have storage and are building libraries of today's encrypted traffic.

Google's Quantum AI research showed a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a bitcoin private key from an exposed public key in about nine minutes, and the company has set 2029 as its target for a post-quantum migration.

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